I'm getting married in August with a stag doo at a retro arcade & pinball convention in Gateshead. Such nostalgia. Kids can't be far off after that. Eeep.

I took on a 3rd job. Or rather became self employed on top of the regular 37.5 week job and the weekend bar work.
The new chef at the pub is on another level though, stints at prestigious places such as Noma in Copenhagen, Heston's The Fat Duck and such. Plates look like art. Search for @erniechef on twitter for what he does.

My extra work is Network Marketing in nature, but I'm happy with it as the company is very supportive and I work with some nice people I wouldn't otherwise have met. I even started to attend a local breakfast network group with people who have like, proper businesses! Wishing I'd given business more serious attention a lot earlier but I always thought it was something better people did.

Since getting a smartphone I find I waste a hell of a lot more time than I used to. I don't even get through my subs to Private Eye or Viz. Before I'd just devour them in a few days. i don't know, the internet can be such a time sink. I'd like to post more but hate typing anything longer than a sentence on the thing.

Still weightlifting, still uploading 3rd Strike matches and I've gotten into Gin.

Technically this isn't really a new game, but an iOS conversion of an old DS classic. The good news is it's great, largely because it's a complete breath of fresh air in many ways

At the beginning of the game your character finds that he's a ghost next to his corpse, which is lying at the bottom of a junkyard. An unfortunate side effect of being recently dead is that you've completely lost your memory, so you've got no idea who you are, let alone why you're lying dead or how you got there... or who the redhead girl is or why she's being attacked by a blue skinned hitman in a sharp suit. And you've only got until dawn to unravel all these mysteries.

Thing is though, you're a lucky ghost because you've got special "powers of the dead" (or indeed "ghost tricks" ) which allow you to possess and manipulate objects, travel down phone lines and rewind time to four minutes before someone's death (except your own, of course) so you can change their fate. And thus an unusual film noir-esque mystery thriller unfolds through the medium of a continuous series of puzzles.

The action itself is quite straightforward. You switch into "ghost mode", where time is paused, to move between objects which you can then manipulate when you switch back to real time. But your transfer range between objects is very short, so you have to create a chain of objects to get from A to B. It starts off pretty simple, with solutions as simple as opening a box will cause the lid to extend far enough for you to reach the gate which you can swing to knock the gun out of the hitman's hand and save the girl... at least temporarily. But it gradually gets more complicated and introduces timing related challenges too, such as open a cupboard door to flick a ball across the room, then quickly move to the ball so you move with it and get into position for the next trick. Thankfully the game is quite forgiving; it's primarily about solving the problem, not precision timing. Once I'd worked out what I was supposed to do it usually only took a few goes to get it right. Also, while some of the solutions can be a little "unusual", the characters are often quite generous with hints to point you in the right direction. I found I made it through the whole game quite comfortably without ever really getting stuck for long.

However, what really sucked me in and held me was the plot. The story is quite dark in theme, but told with tongue firmly in cheek. There's a large cast of crazy characters and events get increasingly outlandish. Things possibly get a little too silly towards the end, but is saved by a suitably satisfying denouement. It's also just about the right length too - I managed to blitz it in probably about 10-ish hours.

I found solving problems and manipulating events from the shadows became immensely satisfying, particularly when combined with the wacky but involving plot served with large dollops of humour.

On iOS it's free to download the app itself which includes the first couple of chapters, and that's more than enough to know if you'll like it. After that you can buy the rest of the plot as an IAP for £9.99, which is a fairly reasonable price for the considerable enjoyment I had from it

If you want something completely different and refreshing then I highly recommend it

Dont really watch wrestling much, but I have been the past week and a half. Managed to wake up early one saturday morning and switched on the tv to find that ECW is back!

Doesnt seem to be no half assed attempt either. Kurt Angle has defected! Tazz, and also...The Big Show. ;o Theyve also managed to get all of the classic wrestlers back, and those that dissapeared without a trace. Sabu, RVD, Terry Funk, Sandman and Tommy Dreamer to name a few.

Ive been hooked to it again because of this...ECW coming back...and in a big way. Unbelievable. Theyve managed to get a decent amount of conflict in with this arc...its actually been good! I remember when they had the whole WWF vs WCW vs ECW thing that they wrapped up in 2 weeks...then back peddled and made the two Raw\Smackdown stables. ¬_¬ THEN...Fucking up the nWo...bastards.

Tonight is the ECW: One Night Stand Pay Per View (Sky Sports One 1am-4am) AND...it will have its own weekly show again! The Matches at ECW: One Night Stand are...

Sabu vs Rey Mysterio: LOL...If Rey doesnt die in this, bullshit!John Cena vs RVD: RVD!!!! RVD FTW! If Cena wins, fucking bullshit! Couldnt believe that he agreed to let Cena to "tap him out"...I cant wait for the cuntish crowd to boo him the fuck out tbh. Tazz vs Jerry The King Lawler: LOL...I want Tazz to win this, even though King is funny, he is a cunt at times. CHOKE HIM THE FUCK OUT.Kurt Angle vs Randy "Im a Gimp" Orton: KURT!!! YEAAAAAAAAH!!!!! YEAAAAAAAAAAAAH

Speaking of Kurt, the guys personality change suits him. His constant shouting and "YEAHHH!" trying to psyche himself up is His music remixed at the beggining sounds ace too. Kurt is the man!

But yeah, all of a sudden Wrestling seems to be much better. For those that dont know, ECW is the "Extreme Championship Wrestling". It mainly had stupidly dangerous matches such as barb wire matches, and generally no rules but to kick the fuck out of whoever was there in the ring. The crowds are mainly cunts as well and used to throw in chairs whenever they felt like it. Probably at times...TOO VIOLENT tbh...but yeah, nothing is as funny watching 2 blokes fall from a scaffold onto the ropes, and then bouncing into the concrete.

Ummm one more thing, how ace are the Video footage editors on WWE. Theres this one trailer with ECW invading Raw and kicking Cena's ass...the music, the video editing...fantastic tbh. For those sceptical about this new wrestling thing, watch it...or I could quickly upload some vids of the weeks gone by of the highlights.

Sabu...Bloke on table, Flying leg drop from the top rope using the chair as guilotine. >_

This is a heads-up. A few months back, when the board went down, I had a chat with Singho and agreed to take over the cost of hosting. Singho paid for, I think, a further six months of life and then it'd be up to me.

I made two or three attempts to contact the hosting company around that time to find out what the process for paying was and received no response to any of my emails. Since then, I've come to the conclusion that I just don't use the board enough any longer - and, to be honest, haven't for nearly four years - to be able to justify paying for it.

As it stands, then, once Singho's final payment has worn off, the place will vanish again.

If anybody else wants to take over the payments, let me know and I'll bung you the email address of the hosting guy and you can see if you can get anywhere with it. Otherwise, I'd suggest that those of you who want to take an archive of the stuff here that you want to keep before it goes for good.

I'm sorry to do this. I don't believe that there's anything fundamentally wrong with keeping the board going for the three or four people who still use it, but as I say, I can't justify the payment for something that I don't really use any longer.

Y'know, this is honestly the most enjoyable objective-based multiplayer FPS I've played in absolutely ages. Unfortunately, it looks like it was pretty much dead on arrival and Boss Key have fundamentally misunderstood how to make a game appealing to a modern audience. Plus, matchmaking seems to have become broken over the last few days.

It's basically a bunch of different Capture the Flag and King of the Hill modes, with minor adaptations to spruce them up a bit and make them feel more competitive. They all work and they're all fun - barring Blitzball, potentially, which can often see one team dominating the other and winning the match in about three minutes. Boss Key have pushed the idea that this is an FPS that brings a skill requirement back into the genre and there is some truth to that. While it's got the Hero Shooter thing of having different characters with wildly differing abilities and weapons, the main thing that you have to learn in this game is how each character moves and how best to make use of thir individual styles of movement.

Each character has a unique jump, for example, plus a unique dash move. One can run more or less constantly, one has a stamina bar that empties pretty quickly, another has a slide move that pushes enemies backwards on contact, a fourth warps forwards. Where the jumps are concerned, some can double jump, some can triple jump, some are that plodding that they barely leave the ground. And you can combine jumps and dashes to find new moves - the robot dude, for example, can convert a jump into a sudden crash to the ground if you change your mind midway.

I guess the obvious USP here is that maps contain areas of extremely low gravity, which adds to the complexity of battle. It's not Descent, but it has that same thing where the other team members could be above or below you, as well as in front, to the left, etc. One character has a move that can create a low-gravity zone wherever they want.

I've really enjoyed getting to grips with some of the characters and finding how best to use them in different situations. There are others in here that feel way out of my comfort zone and that I'm really struggling to do *anything* with. The Assassin is the one that feels most difficult to use properly, but when you consider that most games end with an Assassin player as MVP, it backs up the claim that this is a game that you have to play skillfully in order to be any good at.

But it's a game that's also got some fucking massive problems. The first - the one that most reviews have mentioned - is that it does nothing whatsoever to make it look like it stands out from the crowd. I'm sure there's a lot of technical skill on show here, but there's very little understanding of how to make a game read clearly. Everything has lots of detail, but characters can be stupidly difficult to see. Put it this way: the designers felt the need to put a red outline around the enemy team so that you stand a chance of seeing where the hell they are. That's indicative of a whopping great failure at the heart of your visual design.

Another issue comes with making a team-based game that demands a level of skill above and beyond what the mainstream FPSes ask for. I've had some absolutely wonderful matches in this, really epic-feeling tug-of-war games where teams are evenly matched and everybody clearly understands what it is that they're doing. But I've had others - an increasing number, actually - where I feel like I'm the only person on the team who understands that this isn't just a fucking deathmatch. When you die you have a cooldown period before you spawn again, and you can use this to look through the eyes of your team-mates. The number of times when I've done this and realised that none of them are making any effort to play the objective is depressing.

And now the fatal problem: barely anybody's playing. I've seen people saying that they've seen the number of concurrent players on Steam drop to as few as 13. I'm playing on PS4 and I've had evenings where it's been impossible to find a game. Most evenings, the games I do ghet into don't have a full cohort of players. Fuck, I keep coming across the same people and that absolutely should not be happening for what is still a new game on a platform with a massive installed userbase. It's not the price that's keeping people away - the game's just over £20 on PSN - so I guess the utter lack of publicity, combined with the lack of clear visual identity, combined again with the fact that lots of people presumably think this is just another attempt to cash in on Overwatch's popularity... I guess those are the things that are killing it.

Boss Key are supposedly making efforts to increase the player base. The main one of these misses the point spectacularly. They're adding in team deathmatch. After saying that they wanted this to be different than other FPSes out there, their solution to the problem of a lack of players is to introduce a mode that's in every other FPS. And deathmatch just doesn't fucking work in this game - the character skillsets are tuned entirely around the objective games. They're also talking about introducing proper ranked matchmaking, but I don't see that doing anything other than making it even more difficult to find a game. At the moment, some of the existing matchmaking stuff seems to have broken, too - lobbies aren't loading up a new game after one ends, for me, I'm just left sitting on the results screen with no movement and have to drop out. This means that if I do find a game with a bunch of decent players, I get that one game and then lose them as I have to exit out to the title screen.

I was loving this game the previous couple of weeks. This week, it's just depressing me.

Big shame this one. I guess its further proof that even a big name cant guarantee a minimum number of sales and that theres the potential for as big a gap between game quality and popularity as there has ever been.

We kind of need a new TV. The one we've got is the one that I bought a month or so after I first bought a 360, so it's something like eleven years old now and it shows. There's burn-in down one side of the screen from me watching lots of old 4:3 telly and playing 4:3 games through it - well, not burn-in exactly, but some kind of LCD equivalent - the speakers are kind of crappy and there's always been a significant overscan problem when playing the PS3 through it as well as, I've now discovered, the PS4. And it won't play PS2 titles or some Wii games at quite the right screen ratio (everything's a bit squished horizontally), but that's been a problem from day one.

I took the easy route when I bought it and, instead of doing any actual research into what makes and models were decent, I just found out what MS were using in the 360 demo pods and bought one of those.

But now we could do with a replacement. I've learned to live with the faults, but having finally got a PS4 last weekend I'm finding myself getting really pissed off with the overscan issue again. I could do with some recommendations, though.

Ideally, we're looking for something with an LED screen no bigger than 32" (anything larger would look ridiculous in this room), decent speakers and, if possible, a good selection of different input ports, although I know that's probably a bit of an ask in this day and age. I would like to have component input as well as SCART and, obviously, HDMI, but I guess it's not a deal-breaker. Freeview would be nice, but if it's not there I'm not going to lose any sleep over it. Options to get rid of overscan are absolutely essential.

Anyone got one of these? I'm looking into buying one after a bonus at work and I was a bit concerned about potential input lag from an HDMI pass-through. I'd run everything from the TV but mine's a bit too old to run the sound back to the soundbar (a feature added in 2010 - my TV's a 2009 model).